Dinosaur National Monument Tours

Outdoor Adventures in Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument offers everything you could want in an ideal, fun-filled National Park vacation. Hike, raft and explore where dinosaurs once roamed. Submerge yourself in a canyon surrounded by red rock cliffs. Explore side canyons and oases in a mini-Grand Canyon like setting. Explore Dinosaur’s ancient Native American rock art including petroglyphs and pictographs. And learn about the canyon’s geologic history as you delve deeper into the canyon along the Yampa and the Green rivers.

Dinosaur National Monument straddles the Utah-Colorado border in the northwest corner of Colorado. Paleontologist Earl Douglass and his crew discovered dinosaur fossil beds in 1909, and they excavated thousands of fossils, shipping them to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pennsylvania for study and display. The findings created a great deal of interest, sending all sorts of visitors to the area. Douglass wrote to President Woodrow Wilson requesting the area be protected (against professional fossil looters and homesteaders looking to make a quick buck). Wilson proclaimed the area as a national monument in 1915. The monument was expanded from its original 80 acres to over 210,000 acres in 1938 to protect the surrounding area’s spectacular scenery, geology, ecology and rich cultural history.

Where Dinosaurs Once Roamed

Ten different kinds of dinosaurs were discovered in what is now Dinosaur National Monument. Four of them were long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating sauropods, some of the largest land-dwelling creatures to have ever lived on Earth. More recent findings include virtually a complete skeleton of an entirely new kind of dinosaur—Allosaurus Jimmadsenii.